LibreOffice 6.0 Released

The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 6.0, the biggest release of the fully Open Source Office Suite since LibreOffice 5.x was released in 2016.

One of the biggest improvements in LibreOffice 6.0 is the introduction of Notebook Bar, a ribbon interface that makes it easier to perform many tasks without having to dig through menus. You can enable the feature from the Advanced settings. The new release offers many different modes that users can choose for their own workflows, including a sidebar and a minimalistic single toolbar.

LibreOffice 6.0 claims to offer better file compatibility with Microsoft Office documents. The release also offers the ability to export documents as ePub, an ebook format. “OOXML interoperability has been improved in several areas: import of SmartArt and import/export of ActiveX controls, support of embedded text documents and spreadsheets, export of embedded videos to PPTX, export of cross-references to DOCX, export of MailMerge fields to DOCX, and improvements to the PPTX filter to prevent the creation of broken files,” said Italo Vignoli, one of the co-founders of the Document Foundation.

There is still no release of LibreOffice for mobile platforms that competes with Microsoft Office and Google Docs. LibreOffice Viewer has largely been an app to view documents on mobile devices. But the Document Foundation promises that the upcoming release of LibreOffice Viewer for Android will be able to create new documents. “It will offer a tab-based toolbar with formatting options and will let users add pictures either from the camera or from a file stored locally or in the cloud,” said Vignoli.

LibreOffice is available for the cloud through Collabora. LibreOffice 6.x will bring more capabilities to LibreOffice Online. “New features introduced with LibreOffice 6.0 aim to align the functionality of the desktop and cloud versions, especially in areas where users expect similar behavior,” said Vignoli.

Collabora offers Collabora Online Developer Edition (CODE), a free of cost solution that’s based on the latest version of LibreOffice. Users can run it on their own servers with other open source solutions, like Nextcloud for storage. Collabora also offers a paid version of LibreOffice Online as part of its Collabora Cloudsuite.